LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



The Ethics of Political 
Science 



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A Lecture by William Everett 




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copyright 

By William Everett 

1891 



When Mr. Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg of the United States 
government as of the people, by the people, for the people, his 
words met with general assent. The nation felt that it had its 
own government rightly defined. But such short phrases, however 
tunefully they strike the ear on great occasions, need to be devel- 
oped, or their wit alone is noticed and their wisdom overlooked. 

Our government is in some respects directly by the people. On 
some occasions, as in the case of constitutional amendments, the 
people vote directly upon measures, and say what shall or shall not 
become laws ; but in most cases the government of the people is 
through officers, chosen out of their own bosom, to whom they 
commit the government, to be resumed at stated and not long 
intervals. This I believe is right. I would not have the people 
do everything. I would have them choose the right men, and trust 
them. 

In this way a government of the people is truly held, when 
few restrictions lie on who may be chosen to office, and when the 
people, having selected their legislatures and governors by delib- 
erate choice, leave them with ample powers and ample tenures to 
perform their duty, under strict responsibility always to the people 
of whom they are the deputies, yet at the same time with a sense 
of freedom and discretion, feeling that they are not mere servants 
to obey the people's orders, but true representatives, to think for 
the public welfare. 

One would conceive that such an occupation, by the choice of 
the people of the United States, or of any part of it, or to be 
appointed by one so elected, would be an eminently honorable 
position. In theory, the government of the people, by the people, 
for the people, is the noblest development of political science, 
outranking all despotisms, monarchies, and oligarchies. Practi- 
cally, the people of the United States insist that their service, in 



peace or war, carries with it a distinction that no citizen or sub- 
ject of any other country dare look down upon. To be enrolled in 
the legislative or executive service of this country is looked upon 
in the abstract as most honorable, and the title of an American 
statesman is used as enviable. 

The eagerness to enter on the public service is great. There 
is rarely any lack of candidates for any legislative or executive 
position. Such a thing does happen, but chiefly when the chances 
of election or appointment are small. There are plenty of people 
ready to take what they are likely to get. 

Yet one can hardly utter this last sentence without a tinge of 
sarcasm, without raising the feeling that there are indeed enough 
and too many persons eager for political service, and that it is no 
very honorable quest that they seek. It is the fashion in New 
England certainly to speak with contempt of any man who 
announces himself as a candidate for a political position. He is 
called an office-seeker, and, if very active in politics, a politician, 
which, though only the Greek for "statesman," is made to bear a 
very different sense. Just so we distinguish a physician from a 
quack, and a lawyer from a pettifogger, but with this difference, 
that quacks and pettifoggers are held to be in the minority, or, at 
least, in the background, while honorable doctors and lawyers 
come to the front, and keep the baser grades of their professions 
always under a cloud. But office-seekers and politicians are 
talked of as furnishing the vast number of men prominent in public 
life. The neutral word "candidate," the honorable name "states- 
man " are used sparingly, or on occasions of formal compliment 
alone. It is held glorious to be a statesman and not dishonorable 
to be a public man, but yet that one can hardly go into the profes- 
sion of public life without soiling one's garments, if not his 
person, and that the would-be statesman or public man is almost 
sure to end in that doubtful thing, a politician. 

So, when I state my subject as the Ethics of Political Service, 
many Americans will declare that there are no ethics in political 
service, or, if there are, that they are essentially different ethics 
from those of ordinary life, that the man who voluntarily engages 
in the civil service of the nation must inevitably submit to a 
lowering of moral principle. An ex-senator has stated, or is said 



to have stated, that the Decalogue and the Golden Rule have no 
place in politics. He was vehemently abused for this saying in 
papers and speeches all over the country. After a time he is 
reported as saying that he did not say what he thought should be, 
but what he thought was, "a condition," to borrow another famous 
phrase, "not a theory of politics." 

I am no admirer of Senator Ingalls; but surely much needless 
wrath has been wasted on him for avowing in public what so many 
people are saying in private to each other, and acting as if they 
believed what they said. Let the question be put fairly to most 
of our citizens if they believe that a young man could propose to 
himself a political career, and at the same time retain his moral 
principles and his scrupulous conscience, with the same chance 
of success that he would have if he proposed to be a stainless min- 
ister, a conscientious lawyer, a high-minded physician, an honor- 
able merchant, an honest manufacturer, a faithful mechanic, a 
respectable tradesman, a loyal soldier, a gallant sailor, a faithful 
schoolmaster. I fancy the general reply would be, "No. The 
profession of the politician in this country is tangled up with 
immorality, corruption, self-seeking, trickery. If there are 
honorable and honest politicians, they are exceptions, — unfortu- 
nate exceptions; for they will have worn their hearts out in the 
eternal wrestle with the unscrupulous around them, for whom they 
will ultimately be set aside in their struggle for the highest places. 
I shall advise my son to seek another calling"; and then, if he is 
very witty, he will add, "even a stock broker's or a plumber's." 

I. And be it observed that, with this general denunciation of 
political life, there is in our community a broad line drawn be- 
tween being in public life and trying to be in it. Many persons 
would say that it was an excellent thing to have men of high honor 
and morality hold public office, but that these should come to them 
unsought; that the community should select men who have proved 
themselves high-minded and intelligent in other ways; that in 
such cases serving the public at the public's call is a duty, which 
a good citizen ought to discharge, but that political ambition, for 
which a man lays himself out at the opening of life, is a 
corrupting, an inherently vicious aim, or, to use the popular, to 
me the senseless phrase, "the office should seek the man," and 
should never be applied for. 



Now, I believe this to be a false and demoralizing idea, one 
which has done much to keep out of politics the very men who 
ought to go into it. I will say why. 

i . It seems absurd on the face of it that it can be degrading and 
corrupting to try to obtain what is perfectly proper to hold when 
obtained. Why, if it is honorable for a good man to be in the 
legislature or custom-house, in order to raise the tone of it, and 
perhaps keep out some meaner and less worthy man, is it not 
equally honorable for a good man to be an applicant for the legis- 
lature or the custom-house, in order to raise the standard of candi- 
dacy, and perhaps keep out unworthy candidates? 

2. We make this distinction in no other calling. A young man 
who means to be a minister, a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or to 
go into any branch of trade, says so. He shapes his course with 
a view to that calling. He enters some establishment where he 
will learn it; and, when he feels equipped for the competition, he 
announces the fact. He puts out a sign. He applies for employ- 
ment. He interests his friends in obtaining it. Some men no 
doubt do this by low and dishonorable acts, but they are discred- 
ited in the professions. It is perfectly well recognized that there 
are creditable ways of seeking employment. Perhaps there is no 
more honorable thing to say of a young man than that he is a 
candidate for the ministry. Why not for political position, and 
as directly? 

3. This singular notion that one should not directly and 
avowedly come forward as a candidate for political service is 
peculiar to our day and our community. It is unknown to Eng- 
land and France. It was unknown to the Southern States before 
the war. I do not know of its existence in our own Western 
country. These communities all, I do- not hesitate to say, get a 
better selection of candidates for office than we do, because no man 
there, has to apologize for being a candidate, or affect to wait 
coyly to be asked. 

4. The whole thing involves pretence on pretence. We begin 
by declaring that an honorable desire for the profession of a states- 
man is a conceited and pushing greed for political intrigue, and 
we end by calling sheer artifice for political promotion by some 
honorable and delicate name. A scheming trickster pulls every 



wire that is near his hand to get nominated for office. He sets 
half a dozen lodges and camp-fires at work to hustle him before the 
caucus. He spreads a dozen rumors that straightforward men, who 
in any other community would offer themselves like men, are 
unavailable; and then, when his schemes are all set and the cards 
all rigged for his share in the deal, it is announced that the Hon. 
Jefferson D. Lincoln will allow his friends to use his name for the 
governor's council, and that with great reluctance he has consented 
to stand for the office, which in this case has sought the man. 

5. Once more this way of looking at political office as being 
a thing which no high-minded man must seek, but wait till it 
comes to him, wholly prevents one's preparing himself for it as 
a specific calling. In every other profession there is encourage- 
ment, there is almost a necessity, for a young man to make it a 
study at the best schools for that specialty, because he can almost 
surely command good employment after such training, and without 
that he will almost surely miss it. And the tendency in our 
intensely specializing age is every day to have more and more of 
such training, and to call upon all schools to provide more and 
more instruction for the new trades that are constantly rising to 
professional dignity. There is no calling that demands more 
thorough training than that of a public servant. History, law, 
finance, industry, a hundred elements, make up the daily demands 
of an American politician. You cannot read a single debate in 
one of our legislatures without seeing how from mere ignorance 
and. want of training men of natural shrewdness, of high principle, 
— nay, even of practical experience, — make a botch of their work. 
Sometimes- they are overborne by meaner men, who know what 
they are talking about. Sometimes, alas! their ignorant honesty 
carries the day; and the country is loaded with some measure 
which has everything to recommend it except some slight acquaint- 
ance with the subject with which it deals. 

I know that there is another theory of all this. I know that it 
is supposed that any man can become a good political servant in 
a free country. Honest and patriotic citizens think so, who 
believe that it is as simple an affair to carry out the Constitution 
as it is to read it. But base and selfish citizens know better. 
They know it is by no means a perfectly simple thing to be a 



8 

politician, but that the science and art of politics must be sed- 
ulously learned in some committee-room at the back of a saloon. 
And I would appeal to the patriots if the result is not extremely 
unsatisfactory, annoying, costly to them, and if the bosses, who 
carefully train their candidates to their service, do not make pretty 
much all that there is to be made out of it ? 

Politics is a special calling. All citizens are not equally 
adapted to practise it. The intrigues and bosses have long ago 
established primary schools, preparatory schools, universities, 
professional schools, normal schools, competitive examinations for 
training intrigues and bosses like themselves, or they know they 
could never make a living. Why do not honest citizens recognize 
that politics is a calling which for its honorable practice needs 
honorable training, and that a mere amateur politician ought to 
find it as hard to get employment as an amateur doctor? Yet no 
one will submit to such training until it is considered as honorable 
to offer one's self for service in this calling as in any other. 

I would say then, as my first point, do away with the reproach 
that rests upon politics by encouraging men to go into it. En- 
courage them as the time of the elections draws near to announce 
their wish, not in secret to a few friends, who may then begin to 
work and intrigue for them, but openly, in the face of day, as they 
would announce that they are all ready to serve you in divinity, in 
law, in medicine, in art, in commerce; and, believe me, you will 
have no reason to regret putting a premium on straightforwardness 
and frankness. 

II. But let us suppose that he who is desirous for public service 
has been nominated in such ways as are deemed legitimate, how is 
it about his canvass and his election? Is it not true that the 
candidate is forced to associate with men whom he would never 
think of knowing except as a candidate, to suppress his real senti- 
ments in order to please them, to win their favor by all sorts of 
tricks that he never would think of practising in any other profes- 
sion, and, in a word, to buy his place by the expenditure of what- 
ever commodity his constituents most covet? Do not the can- 
didate for the legislature and the candidate for some executive 
position play into each other's hands by the meanest services, such 
as lawyer and client or doctor and patient would never practise? 



Let us admit that there is truth in all this : let us admit that 
many candidates do stoop to low companions and low actions. I 
ask, Where lies the fault? Who elect? The people, the majority 
of voters: it is they, it is you, who determine on what terms a 
candidate shall be supported. If the votes of the people are for 
sale, it is because the people themselves fix the price. If you 
complain that your member of Congress bought his election, and 
that he could not have got in without money, why do you vote for 
a man who will spend money? If the venal part of the constituen- 
cies to which you belong insists on selling its votes, and if the 
choice lies with such, then you, the unbought, are either in the 
minority or, being in the majority, you let the venal minority 
control you. 

Fellow-citizens, a man of honor, a man of scrupulous conscience, 
will in ordinary cases accept as honorable what men like himself 
call honorable. When they say their service is for sale, he will 
buy it. Before the English Parliament was reformed, there were 
many seats for sale. It was a question of so many thousand 
pounds, sometimes paid to great proprietors in boroughs where 
there was really no constituency at all, sometimes to a venal body 
of voters, with whom the candidate dealt directly. The seat once 
purchased, the member was perfectly free, freer than many a mem- 
ber from a popular constituency, who might interrogate him for 
every vote and tax him for every act displeasing to them. Do you 
suppose it was only self-seeking and base men who got into Parlia- 
ment that way? Not at all. Those seats were often purchased 
by men of the sternest probity and of Puritanical scruples, — men 
who devoted commanding genius and untiring toil to the reform 
of abuses, the upholding of rights, the maintenance of virtue and 
religion in the face of worldliness and corruption. Every relig- 
ious man, every philanthropist, every lawyer, will understand me 
when I say that William Wilberforce and Samuel Romilly 
bought their seats in Parliament as completely as they bought 
their clothes and their houses. Once in, they were almost too 
scrupulous, too sternly honorable, too little indulgent to the feel- 
ings of their fellow-men. William Wilberforce fought for the 
abolition of the slave-trade with a determination which Sheridan 
compared to Napoleon's. Sir Samuel Romilly assailed the bloody 



IO 



penal code of the eighteenth century with a devotion like Henry 
Vane's. Yet they were not eccentric. They were not visionary. 
One was a consistent Tory, the other a consistent Whig. Wil-. 
berforce was thoroughly faithful to the traditions of the English 
Church, Romilly to those of the English bar. The independence, 
the humanity, the fidelity, they showed in their purchased seats 
commended them to the two most independent ■ popular constituen- 
cies in England. Yorkshire chose Wilberforce, and Westminster 
chose Romilly, because they had proved that, though the English 
constitution made most of the doors to Parliament low and dirty, 
they did not part with their honor when the recognized practices 
of the time made them part with their money. 

Fellow-citizens, we have no rotten boroughs in Massachusetts. 
We have no Connecticut towns: we have no Rocky Mountain 
legislatures. If it is possible for a man to buy his way to high 
position here, it is because the people who have votes to give pre- 
fer to sell them, or, at all events, consent that bosses and heelers 
shall do the selling on commission and pocket the proceeds. 

But the associates that a would-be statesman has to encounter 
are so lowering. He cannot select them as he would. This last 
is true. One who solicits the suffrages of his fellow-citizens, of 
whom every man has an equal right in electing him, is obliged — 
he ought to be obliged — to mix freely with all those whose 
suffrage he solicits. He must, he ought to be dragged out of his 
ordinary surroundings, and made to come in contact with all sorts 
of men. Nothing unfits men more for political service than their 
attachment to that particular line of life into which they have 
gone, that curious conceit of their profession which is every bit as 
dangerous as conceit of themselves, — more so, because it is fostered 
by all those who are associated with them from day to day. Your 
business man talks as if only business men were fit to be legislated 
for, your laborer as if none were worth counting but manual work- 
men, your professional man as if professional men alone under- 
stood the country's needs, your soldier as if the country were all 
comprised in the Grand Army and the Loyal Legion. Nothing so 
soon forces a man to understand that his calling is not the only 
one for which the country cares as bringing face to face and voice 
to voice the men who are to elect and the candidates for their 



' II 

suffrages, provided only they are brought together. But are they 
so in our system? A candidate, if he appeals to any constituency 
beyond the limits of his own town, appears before it once, perhaps 
oftener, half a dozen times it may be, to address a meeting. Per- 
haps before that hour he meets a few neighbors in a friendly 
gathering. Perhaps a reception is held, where the absurd process 
is gone through of the candidate's standing up at one end of a 
room with a string of people walking up and shaking hands with 
him, while neither he nor they in the least know what to say to 
each other; and there is no chance if they did, because the next 
man and the next is waiting. Extremely gratifying it may be, but 
how empty ! how absurd ! 

But these people are not those with whom the candidate comes 
into close and frequent contact. These are another class, the 
professional working politicians, the committees whom their fel- 
low-citizens elect to conduct the necessary machinery of a cam- 
paign. And it is upon the heads of these men that the hardest lan- 
guage is lavished. It is these who are believed to make politics 
a trade, and a very mean trade. It is these who are supposed to 
have stripped that occupation of all honor, unselfishness, and high 
motives generally, and to bring such a taint upon all they touch 
that the most honorable and independent of men, no matter what 
his purposes and aims, must, whether as an expectant candidate, 
a nominee, or an elected officer, contract a stain from them which 
will cling to him forever. Such is the general opinion, indepen- 
dent of party, charging both friends and adversaries alike with 
committing the regular management of their politics to men who, 
whether they directly nominate the candidates for public service 
or perchance accept those nominated otherwise, insist on carrying 
on the election by corrupt and corrupting means. If this general 
opinion is true, if practical politics is a low base trade, who made 
it so? Who chooses these committees? Who keeps them in 
power? Who, above all, lets them surround the men, both of 
whom will probably be voted for,, since they have received what 
are called the regular nominations? There is a good deal said 
about the duty of good citizens to attend primary meetings, and 
see that the party nominates proper candidates. This would be 
excellent advice if the primaries really were primaries, if they 



12 

were not properly secondaries, tertiaries, centenaries, millenaries 
rather, where the business which is nominally brought forward for 
the first time has really been cut, dried, soaked, salted, hung up, 
and smoked at a thousand meetings before even the average citizen 
hears of the primary call. But is it not an equal, an even more 
imperative duty for those who regret the lowering of American 
politics to elect on their permanent committees men not merely of 
shrewdness and energy, but of high principles and strict practices?^ 
Do not tell me that such men have not the time to spare from their 
regular business. They have the time to spare for other things. 
Our Sunday-schools, our public schools, our hospitals, our town 
libraries, our charitable societies, our musical clubs, our organiza- 
tions for a hundred serious and social objects, can command week 
in and week out the services of men as different from machine 
politicians as can be imagined. If it is otherwise in political 
management, if a candidate sees such men but sparingly and a 
lower set of men more frequently, whose fault is it but that of the 
citizens themselves? 

Fellow-citizens, it seems to me that in this matter of political 
associations a man is tainted by what he brings, not by what he 
receives. All that the highest authority has said about what goeth 
into the mouth and what cometh out of the mouth, and which of 
these defileth a man, is most true of political companions. That 
man will be tainted and lowered by the low element in politics 
who is prepared to be, who has himself the low nature which con- 
tracts dirt and causes it to stick. Let me illustrate this by a 
homely, but I think not inaccurate, simile. I once bought a car- 
pet which attracted me extremely by the warmth of its texture, the 
good taste of its pattern, and the harmony of its colors. It had all 
these, and was yet at a very moderate price. Soon after it was 
down, spots began to appear in it, which no amount of domestic 
cleansing could get out, unsightly stains, which soon made it look 
worse instead of better than all the other carpets in the house, 
which were yet exposed to exactly the same atmosphere. On 
inquiry, I found that it was probably made by a certain company, 
which was notorious for using half-cleansed wool, still containing 
much grease, which would catch every atom of floating dust and fix 
it forever in spots. I say that a man who is himself clean can go 



- 13 

through the very slums of politics, and get no stain that he cannot 
shake off by one vigorous stamp, while a candidate whose native 
fibre is undressed and greasy will pick up dirt even where none 
can be seen. 

But there are two forces which assail a candidate on the very 
threshold of the coveted service, just before and just after the 
critical day which is to make or mar him. I mean the giving of 
political pledges and the payment of political debts. No doubt 
the courage and the conscience of many men are affected by these 
two forces. And first of political pledges. As soon as it is 
understood that any one is before a constituency, he receives a 
number of addresses, appeals, questions, to make him say beyond 
mistake and in much detail exactly how he stands affected to what 
are called the demands of various interests which are likely to be 
presented to the body of which he is a candidate. These are apt 
to be accompanied by a threat that, if he does not answer satisfac- 
torily each of the questions and demands, he will be politically 
boycotted by the body in whose behalf they are put. This is gen- 
erally a body of undefined numbers, the size of whose vote must 
be pretty much a matter of guesswork. Such bodies are usually 
more earnest than intelligent in their political views, strongly 
holding to a few one-sided principles, crudely expressed in certain 
catch-words, which, if allowed to develop their full force, would 
mean far more than those who use them ever intend. Their ques- 
tions are very peremptory, usually embodying several "demands," 
to use their favorite word, and, whichever way they may be an- 
swered, committing the candidate questioned to an uncompromis- 
ing course of action. If he declines to answer them, or, if in 
answering them, he draws any distinctions, and refuses to be nailed 
to a simple "yes" or "no" on the lines dictated, he is at once 
accused of dodging. If he answers them plainly, but not as their 
propounders wish, he is threatened, I say, with boycotting at the 
polls. If he answers them as desired, there is an even chance that 
he will stand pledged to support opinions that he either does not 
entertain or has never fairly considered, or at least does not hold 
with anything like the tenacity and earnestness of his querists. 
But he is afraid of losing their indefinite vote. He thinks that 
perhaps the question never will come up. Probably, if it does 



14 

come up, he will be let off with a speech or a vote or two, in the 
minority, and then the whole thing will drop; and, as he really 
does not care very much either way, he might as well go in for one 
side as another. And so, between the fear of being thought to 
dodge, which is not dishonorable, and the fear of losing votes, 
which is hard to characterize, many adopt the third course, answer 
as they are desired to, and accept the pledge. 

Such a course seems to me dishonest, shuffling, and cowardly. 
In order not to be thought a dodger, the candidate counterfeits a 
mock enthusiasm and sympathy, which is in itself a dodge. To 
win supporters, of whose real strength he cannot possibly form an 
idea, and who are certain to find him out if there is the least 
pretence in patronage, he loses the only support that never can be 
uncertain, — the support of his own opinion and conscience; and 
he effectually ties his hands in the cases which are sure to arise, 
when principles, stifled for a time, shall speak louder, or when 
interest, misunderstood, shall show how little he gained by subser- 
viency. And, if he agrees in this way to be any man's man but 
his own, where is he to stop? Is he to say, "Yes," to all the 
questions and demands put to him? Is he to be elected, if elected 
he is, fairly plastered over with pledges ; and, having put on badge 
after badge to gain the soldier vote and the farmer vote and the 
labor vote and the Irish vote and the temperance vote and the pub- 
lic schools vote and the single tax vote, is he to lose sight of 
the American citizen's vote, which on every ground is worth all 
put together? 

At every election there are a number of questions of permanent 
or present importance on which every candidate may fairly be 
asked to give his opinion in a straightforward and full way, and 
where he must expect to be held to the opinion so given. There 
are others which are interesting and important without being vital, 
which may become vital hereafter, and on which a sincere opinion 
should, if possible, be avowed, but may fairly be reserved. There 
are others which are vital or important only in the view of half- 
informed and passionate visionaries, or which are set by those who 
believe in them little or not at all for the express purpose of 
entrapping a candidate and turning him into a butt or a fool. To 
decline to answer questions so put is not dodging. It is a 



. is 

righteous and honorable refusal to submit to an 'inquisition from 
which even a candidate has a right to be free. But whether ques- 
tions are fair or not, whether answers are desirable or not, let us 
get rid of this business of pledges. Let us send our members to 
legislative and executive work at home and abroad, knowing their 
opinions, trusting to their honor, but leaving them to their discre- 
tion. They will meet in the discharge of their duties with men as 
faithful, as honorable, as sensible, as themselves. The soundest 
opinions may reasonably be changed. The fairest purpose may 
properly be laid aside. Nay, the clearest conscience may find 
itself in error. Do not deprive your servants of that just exercise 
of discretion which alone makes service worth having, and, by 
expecting them to be fettered in pledges, ratify that outrageous 
dictum of a speaker who could see what is invisible, that legislat- 
ures are not deliberative bodies. It seems to me about as right 
for a legislator to be pledged to vote for a particular bill as for a 
juryman to enter the box pledged, as they are often said to be, to 
vote "not guilty" in a given trial. This whole business of ques- 
tioning and pledging will promote political servility much oftener 
than political purity. 

The necessity of paying political debts is a notorious means of 
demoralizing candidates, and it will continue as long as the people 
of the United States admit the idea that helping elect a candidate 
is always a thing to be paid for. It is a fact that in some places 
votes are bought with money paid to the voter; yet it is denied by 
many people, because they say that would be disgraceful, and 
Americans do not do disgraceful things. On the other hand, it is 
admitted that political workers are rewarded, the leaders by offices 
and the rank and file by labor; and the fact that such compensation 
is admitted shows that most people do not consider it disgraceful, 
and would probably give. way to the system if it crossed their path. 
It may be it is a corrupting system; but, corrupting or not, it will 
last till the people, as a whole, consider it a disgrace, and not a 
credit, to a candidate that he is known to have got places for the 
boys. You may say the candidates ought to begin, that the people 
look to them to set a higher tone of purity. Be it so. But what 
captain, what colonel, is going to storm a battery alone, when his 
command tells him plainly that they are going to wait to see him 



v6 

do it? When a few men who are notorious for finding places for 
the boys get defeated in their second candidacy, we shall begin to 
see purer candidates. In the mean time let me commend to you 
Washington's words from Mr. Scudder's recent Life: — 

"The points in which all my answers to applications for office 
have agreed in substance are that, should it be my lot to go again 
into public office, I would go without being under any possible 
engagement of any nature whatsoever. I thought that, whatever 
the effect might be in pleasing or displeasing any individuals at 
the present moment, a due concern for my own reputation, not less 
decisively than a sacred regard to the interests of the community, 
required that I should hold myself absolutely at liberty to act, 
while in office, with a sole reference to justice and the public 
good." 

III. And now, having got our politician nominated and elected, 
how shall we find him practise his profession? Let no one think 
I have spent too much time on these preliminary matters; for there 
are always twice as many persons nominated as are elected, and 
the attention attracted to the proceedings of all of them during 
the fever of a campaign is more intense than what the successful 
half will receive in months of service. Public men are largely 
judged by the way they stand nomination and election; and those 
eventful hours do much to fix not only the character a statesman 
bears in public estimation, but even the real character, which, 
whether rightly estimated or not, steers him through his political 
life. What ought that character to be? What is it in most cases? 

And at the outset let me not be mistaken. It is my firm belief, 
my deliberate opinion, my practical object, my cherished ideal, 
that the life of a politician, of a statesman, is under the very same 
moral law as that of any professional man, of any business man, 
of any mechanic, of any laborer. What is moral or immoral, right 
or wrong, for a man when at twenty-one he becomes his own 
master, has just exactly the same moral quality at every stage of 
political service, from the committee that waits on a speaker at the 
railroad to the Senator, the Secretary, or the President. Or, 
rather, in proportion as a politician rises in his profession, and 
claims a larger share of authority and attention, so he is called 
upon to set a stricter standard of right and wrong before himself, 



17 

and maintain it before the public, than when he was a private man 
or comparatively low in politics. Nor will I consent to draw the 
distinction which many would, that, while a politician must be 
scrupulously moral in all things which concern his individual life, 
politics as politics, as the business of men associated for political 
purposes, admits a different standard of right and wrong, of honor 
and dishonor; that what would be false or mean or cruel between 
John Smith and Thomas Jones is not so between Committeeman 
Jones and Candidate Smith, acting for their respective parties. 
I am perfectly prepared to be told that I am a mere amateur politi- 
cian, who never will be elected to anything, and do not understand 
matters. I will quote, therefore, in support of my position the 
opinions of two men among the keenest and most dreaded practical 
politicians of their day, who fought the Parliamentary battles of 
America successfully against terrific odds, when she could not fight 
them for herself; namely, Edmund Burke and John Bright. 

"The principles of true politics," said Burke, "are those of 
morality enlarged; and I neither now do, nor ever will, admit of 
any other." "It is not only true in morals," said John Bright, 
"but true in statesmanship; and, in fact, I would not dissociate 
them at all, — what is true in morals from what is true in states- 
manship." And it is most interesting to consider how both these 
great orators and statesmen carried out these principles so uncom- 
promisingly stated. 

The character of Burke was treated in his lifetime in England, 
Ireland, and America with more than admiration, with something 
approaching idolatry; and so has his memory been since his death. 
Yet there are moments in his life when party swept him into its 
vortex to the extent of defending and approving what outside of 
party his great conscience would have scorned; and the stains of 
those very few transactions cannot be wiped out, and stand forever 
as evidence to confirm Goldsmith's famous line. 

But John Bright maintained from first to last as scrupulous a 
simplicity of character as of dress. He dared in the interests of 
what he believed a nation's duty, because it was Christian moral- 
ity, to defy the peerage, to defy both parties, to defy his own 
ungrateful constituents, and accept defeat at their hands, to defy 
the majority of the English nation, passionate in defence of a 



i8 

wicked war or of an insolent minister. He could be unpopular for 
the right when his own Lancashire was groaning under the press- 
ure of our Civil War, and one word from him could have turned 
the starving operatives into hot partisans of the South. He could 
rebuke the Irish, whose champion he had always been, when they 
pressed their demands one step beyond justice; and to the end of 
his life he remained the glory of his nation as he had been of his 
party, forcing his most implacable enemies not merely to tremble 
before his eloquence, but to bow to his virtue. 

This is my standard. This is what politics and politicians 
ought to be, but it is said it is not so. Politicians are said to be 
anything but moralists: politics is said to repudiate the Decalogue, 
and so on. Now precisely the same charges are habitually levelled 
at the other professions, which count a hundred members where 
politics counts one. The same men who call politicians venal and 
false will call the clergy a mass of monks and hypocrites, preach- 
ing what they do not believe, leading weak women astray, and 
denouncing men for vices when they are ignorant of temptations. 
They will denounce doctors as playing with men's lives, pouring 
drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know 
less, and lawyers for breeding strife, distorting evidence, and 
helping the guilty to escape justice. For the managers of our 
great manufacturing and transporting companies, no ink is black 
enough to portray the cruelty, the recklessness, the chicanery, with 
which they are charged. Schoolmasters and schoolmistresses are 
merely forcing intelligent children to dig Greek roots till their 
eyes drop out; and, if we mildly suggest that at least we make 
very little by it, we are told we ought eagerly to engage for 
nothing in the ever-delightful and never tedious task of training 
the young mind. In short, if the politician is habitually abused 
for a low morality, he has to share such abuse with the members 
of the other great professions far more necessary to the public. 
And, as with the doctor, the lawyer, the minister, the railroad 
man, so with the plumber or the politician. The average citizen 
ends by doing without question what this self-seeking, venal, lying 
person tells him to, and pays him. As far as so-called public 
opinion goes, the politician is no worse than his neighbors. 

But it must be admitted that public men themselves are too slow 



' 19 

to repel this accusation of inferior morality. The Kansas senator 
is by no means the only active politician who has not only 
declared, but boasted that the moral law of Jew or Christian has no 
place in politics. While men of every other profession are ready 
to stand up, rightly or wrongly, for the purity of motives and prac- 
tice in that calling, the politician alone deals in the opposite 
miserable vice, for which we have no name, but which the Greeks 
called irony, boasting of being worse than you are, and saying, 
"God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are, scrupulous, 
candid, generous, or even as this Pharisee. I vote twice in the 
day. I take tithes from all that I elect." If politicians persist in 
throwing away the cloak of respectability, they must not be sur- 
prised if their fellow-citizens proceed to take away their coat also, 
in the expectation of finding a skin that sadly needs a bath. 

But we ought to consider whether a public man in America is 
under temptations to adopt a low standard of public morality, 
whether it is harder for him than for other men to be scrupulous 
in all his conduct. I believe there are such temptations, and that 
citizens and voters are bound to consider them seriously. And, 
first, the very publicity of political service, the picking out of a 
man to be one of the few whom the city, the country, or the State 
sees fit to employ, is calculated to turn any man's head, and shake 
his moral balance. The very fact that any man has a special posi- 
tion, special authority, special influence, that he can do what 
others cannot, almost inevitably creates in him the feeling, which 
rose to its maximum in Napoleon Bonaparte, that he may do what 
others may not, and that as he to some extent makes the laws for 
others, so he may also make the law for himself. There is per- 
haps no more maddening excitement, no more ecstatic pleasure in 
life, than to be hailed with shouts and clapping as one of the 
chosen leaders of a free people; but there is nothing which should 
make a man tremble for himself more profoundly, and remember 
that he is a man. 

" O popular applause ! What heart of man 
Is proof against thine all-seducing charms ! 
The wisest and the best feel urgent need 
Of all their caution in thy gentlest gales ; 
But, swelled into a gust, who then, alas ! 



20 

With all his canvas set, and inexpert, 
And therefore heedless, can withstand thy power ! 
Ah ! spare your idol, think him human still ! 
Charms he may have, but he has frailties, too ; 
Dote not too much, nor spoil what ye admire." 

In the United States there is a constant temptation to waive 
one's scruples from the pressure of local and private interests 
which demand satisfaction. An American politician is expected 
to be obliging. He is expected to help on this or that interest 
which in some peculiar local or personal way appeals to him. He 
thus gets into the habit of yielding his own sense of what is proper 
in order to get the favor of a doubtful constituency or an influ- 
ential friend. He cannot compass these objects alone. He must 
get help; and so that exquisite business of log-rolling begins, 
whereby a man votes for twenty schemes about which he knows 
and cares little, in order to get twenty men's help for a scheme 
about which he knows and cares too much. This is partly the 
result of the great size of our country, but our vicious system of 
strict district representation is largely to blame for it. I trust it 
will not be improper for me to express an emphatic opinion in 
favor of going beyond district lines in selecting candidates, with 
a view to break up local manceuvrings. And also I believe there 
must soon be halt called to our inordinate legislation in favor of 
local and special interests, which overrides and stifles national 
claims and duties. 

We call such business jobbery; and it is not unnatural that one 
who is often called upon in his public capacity to perpetrate jobs 
for others, schemes which are only for private ends, but have to be 
paraded as for the public interest, should be tempted into jobs for 
himself. But the word "job" has another not dishonorable mean- 
ing, — a piece of work for which a workman is definitely engaged, 
to be dismissed when it is done. Our political work is too often 
regarded as job work in this sense. It is too commonly held that 
public men are appointed to do merely as they are told, merely as 
handicraftsmen, not members of a liberal profession. As a result, 
they get to think so themselves. They become like apothecaries 
putting up prescriptions rather than physicians grappling with 
disease, clerks drawing writs rather than counsellors trying cases; 



21 

and thus I believe a high, refined, sensitive, professional honor is 
sure to give way to a lower, blunted, rough mechanism of feeling 
about their occupation. 

Our people, I fear, often mistake their position with reference 
to those who are elected and appointed to office, in that they 
expect to dictate to them, to control them, to make them mere 
mouth-pieces and agents, instead of leaving them to their discre- 
tion and sense of responsibility to manage the critical and compli- 
cated business of state-craft. These ought to be under obligation 
to report from time to time to their constituents, and to accept 
defeat if their conduct has proved unacceptable. Still, the public 
servant should feel that he is trusted, and that, after some long, 
varied, arduous term of service, encountering men every whit his 
equals, he shall not be bitterly reproached, still less displaced, 
merely because he has not accomplished, perhaps on a calm review 
of the case has not tried to do, all that his sanguine and probably 
half-informed electors asked at the outset. 

Fellow-citizens, we are thinking at this moment far too much of 
measures, constitutions, statutes, and far too little of men. You 
may remodel your methods of legislation as much as you please. 
You may declare in desperation that we do not know how to work 
our own constitutional liberty, and transplant processes from Switz- 
erland, which seems to me as sensible as moving the Jungfrau 
with all her chamois and glaciers over to the Chicago Exposition. 
You cannot draw up any organic frame of government or work out 
any system of laws that can possibly provide for every case that 
will not be misinterpreted, evaded, broken. To make, to execute, 
to expound, your statutes, you want men, — men of learning, of 
energy, of experience, of genius, — leaders not merely to interpret 
and conduct the popular will when it is right, but to mould it, 
turn it, restrain it, check it, rebuke it, if need be defy it when it 
is wrong, remembering that a nation can be wrong, and that there 
is one voice greater even than that of the United States, — the 
voice of reason, of conscience, of history, of posterity, of God. 

But of all the causes that lower the moral standard among poli- 
ticians, and tempt them to act against their convictions, promoting 
what they cannot approve and suppressing what they believe, the 
first is the spirit of party. The spirit of party accepts as its rule 



22 

of conduct allegiance to a body of men who have agreed to work 
together to control the elections and policy of the country. This 
agreement may be founded on some political theory or principle, 
on some schemes of present importance, on devotion to some leader 
srreat or small, on the tradition of measures or men in times srone 
by; or, lastly, it may be founded on nothing but a name, under 
which men agree to hunt together for that public spoil which they 
are more likely to get jointly than in division. This party spirit 
may therefore draw into itself all motives, from the highest to the 
lowest. It may develop heroes and martyrs or brigands and 
blacklegs. It may make a political connection take the character 
of a church, an army, a firm, a conspiracy, a confederacy, or a 
mob. Lord Somers and Titus Oates may both be Whigs; Bishop 
Ken and Sir John Trevor may both be Tories. But the true devotee 
to party acknowledges a law of action in public life which is to 
shut his ears alike to the wider demands of patriotism, the sounder 
views of judgment, and the sterner appeals of conscience. 

We all know the arguments offered to show that party govern- 
ment is necessary in a free country, that public affairs could not 
be conducted if every one undertook to go on his own lines of 
thought and action, or if one tried to satisfy the whole country 
every time. There is no need of presenting this view to you. 
You hear it on all sides, from members of both the great parties; 
and there is no one here who thinks about the matter at all that 
has not at his tongue's end a score of commonplaces on the subject. 
It seems to be argued that failure to belong to some party, to at- 
tend its caucuses, or at least accept their nominations, to stand by 
its candidates, to support its measures, to rejoice in its success, 
and to grieve at its defeat, is as absurd as to come to a station to 
take a train, and, instead of sitting down in the cars and waiting 
till they go, to jump on the engine, seize the valve, and try to set 
it in motion at one's own wayward time, regardless of the arrange- 
ments made for the public. In short, party allegiance is made a 
virtue, like fidelity to a wife or to a flag. It is held that there is 
something morally wrong in not doing all one can to help a party 
as a party, and that rendering such help, if not in itself pure 
morality, condones and excuses what under other circumstances is 
immoral. Moreover, it is held that this allegiance is perpetual, 



23 

not passing away when questions of the hour are settled, or when 
great leaders have done their work and gone to their rest. A 
party is held to be an undying and indissoluble corporation. 

Now, the immediate effect of this theory is to confound useful 
methods with absolute truths, to exalt machinery to the level of 
force. Our government is by and for the whole people. Nothing 
less. Yet we allow a majority to govern. Why? Because there 
seems no other practical way of approximating to the sense of the 
whole. But that does not make the part or the party equal to the 
whole. It does not turn an approximation, often a very remote 
and rough one, into the true value. Our party is in a majority. 
It is therefore the country; and all the minority are an unpatriotic 
faction, wrong in principle, rebellious in practice. Two years 
pass. Our majority steadily lessens. Still, our party is eternally 
right, and their party eternally wrong. At last the balance is 
reversed. They are in the majority. We are in the minority. 
Are they now equal to the country? Are they the true patriots? 
Are we factious rebels? Oh, no! They are tricky usurpers, who 
have imposed upon the people. We are still eternally right, not 
really rebuked, only unfortunate. And all the time they were 
saying just the same of us in their hour of weakness as now they 
re-echo what we said when the triumph was ours. 

And who is this people whom we claim to represent, who in- 
dorsed us two years ago, but were deceived by our enemies yes- 
terday? Is it a body inside both parties or outside both or partly 
in each? Does its vote equal the sum or the difference of the 
two party votes? Does it include active politicians or only silent 
voters? These questions show at once that the notion that a part 
can ever be equal to a whole is always absurd. And, finally, it is 
perfectly easy to show that, owing to our complicated methods of 
voting, a so-called party majority which elects is often an actual 
minority of the national vote. 

Again, this theory makes mere fidelity to associates the sum and 
substance of all virtue. It is held to be enough to say in praise of 
a public man that he stands by his party or in censure of him 
that he leaves it. But suppose his party is tainted? suppose cor- 
rupt men get the upper hand? suppose its machinery is employed 
on measures so wrong or so foolish that he cannot in conscience or 
reason support them? suppose, in short, that he finds that his league 



24 

has become one for evil, and not for good? He will probably not 
be alone in these views. Others will feel with him that the party- 
must change or must break, or, rather, that the party is now two 
parties, and their differences of principle are too radical for com- 
promise or concession. Must he and his submit, and for the sake 
of a party victory lose all that makes a party victory worth having? 
Is the honorable and wise politician first to try to get his honor- 
able and wise measures accepted by his base associates, whom he 
will have to pay higher and yet higher bribes for such support? 
No. In such cases, fidelity to associates is a sin and a crime. 
A contract to do immoral things will stand in no court. Party 
allegiance must exist, subject to earlier and higher duties to one's 
country and one's conscience. 

Perhaps the worst temptation that assails a public man is that 
of habitually speaking and acting as if his own party were all men 
of sense and honor, and all of the other party were fools and 
knaves. I cannot express it better than in the words of Sir James 
Stephen: "That dangerous counterfeit of public virtue which con- 
sists in thinking that your enemies are desperately wicked and 
deceitful above all things, and that your own party objects are so 
obviously right and wise that whoever opposes them must act from 
the vilest of motives in pursuit of the worst of objects." 

I need not describe this temper to you. You see it every day, 
how it insinuates itself into private life, how it turns those who 
ought to know each other, trust each other, love each other, into 
strangers and enemies. You know how, even when men retain 
their mutual confidence in private life, they refuse to act together 
in public life, even on questions where by no possibility party 
history or party principles can be introduced, because they have 
learned to distrust their own feelings, judgment, conscience, where 
a political opponent is concerned. Can this result be anything 
but bad? Can it help leading to session after session of legislat- 
ures where good men do little but wrangle, where base men merely 
intrigue, and the poor country do nothing but pray for the day of 
adjournment? 

On the Land Law discussions of 1890 the Irish leaders deliber- 
ately declared that they would accept a certain bill if proposed by 
Mr. Gladstone, but would reject the identical measure coming 
from Mr. Balfour, even though they were consulted themselves on 



25 

its details. What is this but stupid party malignity? In 1880, 
at a meeting of congratulation on General Garfield's election, I 
heard an orator declare that one transcendent achievement of the 
party was the defeat of the infamous Chalmers, the agent of the 
Fort Pillow massacre. In half a dozen years the identical Chal- 
mers had changed his party name; and the party that elected 
General Garfield were working to elect him. Only put a given 
drug into a bottle labelled "our mixture" or "their mixture," 
and it becomes cordial or poison accordingly. 

Every party which is something more than a mere brigands' 
confederacy for spoils is founded on some principle. This prin- 
ciple may be permanent, rooted in the very theory of govern- 
ment, or it may be temporary, brought up by the hour, and 
destined to pass away. But, whether permanent or temporary, 
such a principle never represents more than half of the whole 
truth. Conservatism and reform, liberty and order, our insti- 
tutions and our needs, capital and labor, generosity and economy, 
the legislature and the executive, stability and progress, — there 
is truth, there is right, there is duty on either side. An in- 
telligent and honest man, a patriot, an enthusiast, can find in 
either column ground for energy, for effort, for eloquence, for for- 
bearance. But whoever persuades himself that his principle is 
the only one, that the shield has only one side, and that the coun- 
try should go on forever following that principle alone and never 
letting its pendulum swing in other direction, is ignorant of phi- 
losophy, unread in history, mistaken in practice. He rather ought 
to hail the defeat of his favorite principle at times, because it 
assures him that the country as a whole is thinking for itself; 
and no partisan deserves to be listened to as a leader who does not 
treat his opponents not merely with courtesy, with respect, with 
good humor, but with candor and deference, as those who see a 
truth not yet clear to himself. 

Fellow-citizens, these cautions against the spirit of party, as 
tending to pervert and dull the consciences of political men, are 
not new. They have been the warnings of the wise and good for 
ages, of men to whom practical politics were perfectly familiar 
under every form of government. They find their loftiest exposi- 
tion in "Washington's Farewell Address." I am not going to 



26 

weary you with a long list of profound philosophers and laborious 
statesmen who have seconded his counsels, but will give you a 
single testimony, new to most of you and profoundly valuable by 
reason of its author. 

In 1816 our war with Great Britain was over, and the country 
was slowly raising its head from the miserable condition into 
which it had been plunged. New States were rapidly coming into 
being which knew nothing of Federalism or Republicanism. Mr. 
Monroe was elected President with slight opposition. A promi- 
nent public man in middle life, but covered with laurels both civil 
and military, urged upon Mr. Monroe to adopt a liberal and non- 
exclusive policy in his appointments, because he said the condition 
of the country afforded a noble opportunity to destroy "the monster 
party." That adviser was Andrew Jackson. 

Fellow-citizens, I am sensible I have detained you too long. I 
have offered these considerations to you not as exhausting the sub- 
ject, not as solving the problem, but as points whereon to reflect. 
That the career of the statesman involves a sacrifice of morality 
I do not believe. I do not believe he need truckle to audacity, 
nor strike hands with fraud, that he need be either a hypocrite or 
a charlatan any more than a physician or a lawyer need be the 
same. His conspicuous and distinguished calling offers countless 
opportunities, it may be, to prefer the expedient to the right, or 
the selfish to either; but it also offers equal opportunities for 
heroism and self-sacrifice. And I believe that the people of the 
United States, however compelled sometimes to put up with weak 
and rotten tools, will seize at every chance the more finely tem- 
pered and brightly polished blades. And where should that tem- 
per and that polish be better acquired than here? It may be true, 
I believe it is true, that we all need a moral uplifting. I believe 
in my soul that every calling in the country needs to react from a 
species of Bohemian self-complacency towards a stern Puritanism. 
Let the people, let the voters, show on every occasion that honor 
and conscience are dear to them, and their politicians will not be 
slow to take the hint; and, leaping over centuries of fog and going 
back to the pure clear air of the divine Homer, let one patriotic 
statesman challenge the other in the mottoes of Achilles and Hec- 
tor. "Ever the first to be, and stand in the van of the others." 
"One best omen is ours, to fight in defence of our country." 



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